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December 05, 2017

I have a long history of writing about technology in the month of December. Two of my favorite old articles are Please Don't Hit Me With Your Modem that I wrote in 2010 and Computer Battle that I wrote way back in 2004. Technology (and my opinions) have really changed since those articles got published.

I have been in the technology business for over thirty-five years which includes almost twenty years at Apple. When you are a manager at a large technology company, you get spoiled with new technology. However, it has been over thirteen years since I left Apple and I have figured out how to do with a lot less. Essentially I do a quinquennial, once every five years, technology fresh and am happy with it. Looking at technology that permeates our lives at least that regularly prevents a lot of problems.

We all need technology these days, and if you just wait for things to break before upgrading, sometimes recovery can get messy. Sometimes we all need to buy something because of a death in the computer family but if I do my quinquennial refresh, that is rare.

I still know people that get a new computer every year or two but I do not feel that need any more than the need to get a new car every year. My main work computer is over seven years old but has had upgrades. Since I use five different computers most days (and that does not count my smartphone), I am not a normal computer user. Most normal people might just have only one or two computers in their household.

Our family technology refresh this year has included two new laptops, one for my wife and one for me. A new wireless phone set. A new small television and a new digital camera. A few things have been improved by switching to gear that we already had or by adding new components. I am really happy with the results. Our computers are all working great. The pictures coming from my new camera are outstanding. Our new Panasonic DECT 6 wireless phone sets are fantastic especially the paging feature which makes life simpler since my workspace is far from the rest of the house. We also bought a small $130 television set and added an Amazon Fire Stick for connectivity instead of connecting it to cable. The television provides much better quality than our expensive Sony that was installed eleven years ago.

You can translate all this into something useful for yourself. If you are buying a laptop this year and also only want to upgrade every five years like we do, expect to spend between $700 and $1,200 for a good laptop that will last five years or more. As I am writing this just before Christmas 2017, you should look for a minimum of an eight generation I5 processor, 8GBs of RAM, and a 256GB SSD (Solid State Drive). Your system should come with a touch screen and at the low end of the price range a minimum screen resolution of 1920x1080. At the upper end, you should be getting much higher screen resolution, double the RAM and double the SSD capacity. A system similar to these specs will last a long time.

Personally, I have had good luck with Lenovo, HP, and Dell laptops. My wife's system was bought in the summer a few months before eight generation Intel processors were available but it is fine for her needs. We both got both systems for less than the $1,999 price of one Mac Book Pro laptop with less impressive specs than mine. (Details in the geek section)

The one thing that might throw laptop purchasers who have been out of the market for a while is USB-C. The hub pictured at the top of the post is one of the USB-C hubs that are common. Some new laptops only come with USB-C ports now. My HP Envy has both USB 3 and USB-C. With the help of my hub, one USB-C port provides Ethernet connectivity, the connection for a monitor and an SD card reader. Expect to spend about $40 for a good USB-C hub. I consider mine more of a dock for the laptop when I am working at my desk as opposed to traveling.

My other upgrade to computers was to replace the last mechanical drive in my computer fleet with an SSD. Since it was an older I5 Lenovo desktop with only 8GBs of RAM, I also installed Xubuntu Linux as the main operating system. The system which was slow as molasses is now super speedy and very reliable.

While my son was visiting at Thanksgiving, he noticed that we had two wireless networks in our house. I had a wireless network with a router but it turned out that our relatively new cable modem had wireless turned on and was broadcasting DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) addresses. Without descending too far into a technology whirlpool, it was not good to have two WAPs (Wireless Access Point) competing for spectrum. I had not noticed since most of my serious computing is done in the wired portion of the network where my computers and printers are hooked up by Ethernet. My son said he got better speeds out of the one from the cable modem so I removed mine from the network and fixed the new wireless setup so it uses OpenDNS servers which provide a little bit of filtering.

The new television we got was an inexpensive 32" Toshiba for around $130. We bought it to replace an old-fashioned tube television in a bedroom but we are currently using it in our new family room until we can decide on (and afford) a new larger television. The picture quality is exceptional. We are hoping to get one of nice LGs at some time in the future. I needed a new computer more than a new television. Our home entertainment equipment with the exception of the new TV is hopelessly outdated but my wife is happy with it and I hardly watch television.

The camera I got this year is a PANASONIC LUMIX FZ1000 4K Point and Shoot Camera, with 16X LEICA DC Vario-ELMARIT F2.8-4.0 Lens, 21.1 Megapixels, 1 Inch High Sensitivity Sensor. The big selling point for this camera is 20 megapixels and the 1-inch sensor.

I still use a Panasonic LUMIX DMC-LX100S 4K and my Canon SX60-HS which was repaired once again. The SX60 is a refurbished replacement that I got when Canon could not repair my longtime favorite Canon SX50-HS. I am also still using the Nixon D3100 that I got in 2010.

We also bought a set of Panasonic KX-TGE475S Link2Cell Bluetooth Cordless Phones with Answering Machine. We had replaced the batteries more than once on an old Pansonic set which we bought eleven years ago. The phones were much cheaper from Amazon and the sound quality is noticeably better than our old ones.

If you are really interested in the geeky details of all the computers and how we got to do this about once every five years read the next section, but it is really written so I can remember the details the next time I have to do an upgrade.

-David

Technical Specs and How the Quinquennial Cycle Evolved

The first priority this year was upgrading my wife's computer this summer. She was well past the five-year mark on her laptop though she did get a Chromebook a couple of years ago and it extended the useful life of her other computer which was a 2010 I5 HP laptop with 4GBs of RAM and a 500GB mechical hard drive. While her old computer looked brand new, it had become slow and there was little that I could do to fix it without starting to replace parts. We bought her laptop together with one for me back in February 2010. The two laptops together cost around $1500 after rebates. We considered Apple laptops but at the time we could not have gotten one Mac laptop for the price that we paid for the two HPs and the Mac laptops were stuck on an old processor. You can read the full reasoning behind those purchases in this Applepeels post.

The quinquennial upgrade can be traced to a couple of years later when my HP 2010 laptop got repurposed and sent to my youngest daughter. There was nothing wrong with it but she needed a laptop and I was starting a stint as a technology writer at ReadWrite Web. I needed new technology so I could write about operating systems and such. It was the fall of 2012 and on Black Friday that year we drove to Wilmington and I bought a Lenovo Yoga at Best Buy. It was $999 and had an I5 processor, 4GB RAM and a 64GB SSD (Solid State Drive.) It was a little of bit of a gamble since we did not know how long my technology writing career was going to last. The job seemed to go well so a few months later we bought a MacMini through a friend still working at Apple. That spring I also upgraded my main camera and got a Canon SX50 HS. The technology upgrades were more than paid for by the articles that I wrote, but turning out articles was like being on a treadmill and predicting what might be of interest to an ever-changing editor was not a lot of fun. It paid the bills but if you figured it as an hourly wage, it was scary. Fortunately, I had started my current job at WideOpen Networks the previous summer and about the time I burned out as a technology writer, the new company was coming up to speed.

I might have skipped this upgrade cycle but my main Windows desktop started dying on me this summer. Over the course of a few months, I managed to keep it going but it finally gave up the ghost and I took it to a computer repair shop. This was the first time in over thirty-five years that I have ever taken one of my personal computers to a repair shop so you have to figure that the system was in serious trouble. The shop finally determined that it was the motherboard but a new Lenovo motherboard was close to $400 dollars and more than I wanted to spend on an old computer. They assured me that they could order another motherboard for $150, put it in my case with my 32GBs of RAM and I7 processor and everything would be fine. A week later it turned out the third-party motherboard would not fit in the Lenovo case so we ended up ordering another case for about $100. Once the case came in and the motherboard and all the parts were installed, the computer would still not turn on. With the next step being a new processor at $450, I pulled the plug on the operation and felt lucky that my repair shop billed me zero dollars since they could not fix my computer. It does not take a technology expert to know that spending close to $700 on an old computer is crazy.

At that point, I needed a new computer to do my photographs. I wanted a system with an eighth generation I7 processor, 16 GBs of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, and 3840 x 2160 screen. I managed to find a 13 inch HP Envy at Costco with those specs for $1,099. Just to make certain that I was not making a mistake, I hauled my even-geekier son with me to Wilmington to make certain that I got the right computer for my needs. For comparison, my wife's system was a Lenovo 720 with the seventh generation I5, 8GBs of RAM, and 256 GB SSD. It cost around $800 with a touchscreen at 1920x1080 resolution. We got our two systems, both with touch screens, fingerprint sensors, and mine with the latest I7 processor, a 512GB SSD, 2GB NVIDIA GeForce MX150 Graphics and 16 GBs of ram for $100 less than one Mac Book Pro with an older processor and only 8GBs of RAM. Apple's laptop math continues to make no sense to me.

With a 13.3" laptop taking the place of my desktop, I wanted to make sure my ten-year-old Dell monitor was up to the task. My son took one look and said that it was losing its brightness. I took advantage of Dell's Black Friday's sale and got a new 27" Ultrasharp monitor for $395 instead of $595. All I had to add for everything to be complete was the USB-C hub that I discussed earlier.

October 16, 2017

I have been lucky to work in home offices most of my professional career. The office was also the dining room on our Tay Creek farm. In Halifax it was a small, designed-for-an-office space just off the main entrance. My wife claimed it was a great place to see the back of my head.

Our Columbia home had another tiny office just off the entrance. When we moved to Roanoke in 1989, I got to use a huge space in our newly finished basement. I takes three pictures to get a good view of it, picture 1, picture 2, and picture 3. It might seem overly large but for over a decade I ran Apple sales teams from there including the last few years when I was director of federal sales and had a national sales team. I did everything from generate bids for colleges to house equipment that had no other home.

The Apple office made a great place for kids to play some of the first networked games. It also served as a second home for many projects from the Roanoke Valley Governor's School. There were always students borrowing the demo color laser printer that Apple was afraid to ship around and consequently dropped from the product line. The Roanoke office was where I first got on the Internet. We went from modems of varying speeds to line of sight antennae to DSL and finally to a cable modem. I spent a lot of time on the modem dialing into Apple's IBM mainframe and downloading sales reports.

In 2006 after I had left Apple and was president of sales at WebMail.us, we had a water leak that meant the office got a remodeling and I had to start over. I wrote this post, The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair, just as I was starting up once again. Sometimes it is good to start over because you get to clean up the cables which have a tendency to become like a ball of snakes after a decade or so.

The fact is that starting over is easier and easier. I have written about the instant economy that allows businesses to get what they need to start up in hours instead of months. It is also very easy for a home office to get everything that it needs. Sometimes all it takes is an afternoon trip to Best Buy or Staples.

Eleven years ago when I wrote about setting up my home office on the Crystal Coast in the post, The not so reluctant home system engineer, I had worked through a number of challenges getting things running smoothly. Things have gotten a lot easier when it comes to networking and printers. Because I have a son with even greater geek tendencies than me, I now have a NAS (Network Attached Store) with multiple terabytes of storage. After thirty-five years in the technology world, I also have a pretty good idea of what works well. With that in mind I had Cat 5 Ethernet run from my old office to my new office.

I was a little surprised when our electrician did not know how to install the Ethernet jacks since I had seen our system engineers at Apple do it plenty of times. I ordered from Amazon the needed punch down tool and punch down block with the right jacks and did it myself. This being my first time at putting ends on Ethernet cables, I wondered if it would all work. I hauled a laser printer upstairs to the new office and connected it to the wall jack. Then I ran an Ethernet cable from my current Ethernet switch to the new wall jack in my old office. I sat down at my Mac and printed a document to the printer upstairs in the new office. It worked. Now I can gradually move things from the old office to the new one and never lose connectivity. I am very happy that laser printers are a lot lighter than they used to be back in the eighties.

It is amazing how much technology has changed. My first blog post on View from the Mountain was almost thirteen years ago and I was wrestling with my first Windows/Linux machine. My desktop has changed a lot since then. Windows occupies a much great part of it but I still have some vintage Macs chugging along in addition to my Windows computers and now Linux runs on my Mac instead of my Windows computer. My photo work is now all done on Windows but I think iMac from 2010 which got rescued by a repair will have a place in the new office for a while.

Some things do not change. I am still using an IKEA table as a first desk as I build my new office just like I did back in 2006. This is the first post written from my nice new office. It is a great spot to write.

February 20, 2013

A life lived without passions for ideas or other people is a boring existence.

However, a life lived with a fiery passion for things or ideas without respect for others and their opinions is a self centered life which damages the humanity of those which it touches.

There are some things which are central to my being. I believe that helping others achieve their reasonable goals in life is a good way to live. I strive to make any relationship or place where my presence has been felt better for my having been there. After over sixty years, I am enough of a realist to know that this will not always happen.

People interpret things differently. Often people hear different things when others speak or even read the same words and come up with different meanings. Just look at the Second amendment. Its vague wording taken out of the context of time is something that people are willing to fight about hundreds of years later.

It is not just words on paper or the Internet that can drive people to disagreement. In our material world people can get very emotional about things. We all have a bias towards things we like or perhaps the ones which have an important place in our lives.

I have raised Angus cattle, sold Vermeer round balers, and worked at Apple selling their computers. To effectively sell a product, you need to believe in it and it is actually best if you know the product through using it yourself.

When I chose to raise Angus cattle while living the Canadian Maritimes, I did not pick the most popular breed in the area. I actually picked the breed which I thought would help me be successful. Angus have a hard won reputation as cows which produce calves that need little or no assistance. It turned out in the ten years that we had cattle, we probably had over five hundred calves born in our woods. I might have helped two or three calves be born. We had the vet on a farm a couple times for a sick animal. Angus lived up to their reputation for us.

Similarly I picked Vermeer balers for their reputation for quality and dependability. They worked well for me, and I sold several to other people. I could sell them easily because like most other Vermeer dealers I used the balers in our own operation. I used round balers at time when provincial agriculture people painted those of us using them as crazy. When I traveled back to New Brunswick in the fall of 2012, thirty years after we sold all our cattle, I found every remaining cattle farmer using round balers.

When I went to work for Apple computer in 1984, I had already been selling computers, both Apples and PCs, for a couple of years. The Macintosh had been on the market for a few months when I joined Apple. I thought the Mac with its graphical user interface and WSIWYG display was a better way for computer users to get their work done. I stayed at Apple nearly twenty years, but along the way a lot changed, computers became more similar than dissimilar. I learned that in some environments people were very happy with their Windows computers.

Also during my time selling Apple computers, I ran into users who were so in love with the Macintosh and the whole idea of Apple that they made our job of selling Macintoshes into the enterprise harder not easier. Some of them pushed the Macintosh so relentlessly that CIOs did not even want to hear the word Macintosh. These lovers of Macs were perhaps the first "fanboys" that I encountered.

While I might have disagreed with a neighbor's choice of Hereford cattle instead of Angus, we were still neighbors and cattlemen. We were more alike than different. Similarly if someone bought an International or John Deere Round baler, we were all still considered crazy by the department of agriculture and besides that I had both John Deere and International tractors on our farm.

No long ago I had an idea that revolved around the supposition that most Apple users will pretty well blindly follow Apple wherever it leads. The second part of the idea was that Apple users have a fundamentally different relationship with Apple than Microsoft users have with Microsoft.

I backed my thoughts up with Apple users who are used to the idea that if there is a problem with their computer or iPhone, they are actually the cause of the problem. While I overstated my case to make a point, I do find that many Apple users are less demanding of Apple than Microsoft users are of Microsoft. Fortunately there is a wide range of users in both camps. There are some vocal Apple ones and also some acquiescent Microsoft ones.

My idea did not go anywhere, but it was one of things that just are not worth fighting over. Who really cares whether or Apple users are more like sheep than Microsoft users. Even if I made the argument would anyone remember it a couple years from now? The answer of course is no. It was only a thought and I did not care to fight over it.

Of course many things you write about are that way. Unfortunately people take them far more seriously.

There are those who are so in love with an iPhone or an iPad, that the slightest hint their products are not worthy of worship brings out a personal attack on the writer. As is often the case, the worst comments are from those whose identities are usually at best hidden behind an online moniker and at worst "anonymous." While I have written about this issue before in the "The not so amazing lack of civility on the web," it still bothers me that I can be attacked as a person for something as simple as an opinion about a product.

Surely we have become civilized enough to agree that the happiness in your life is not dependent on whether you are using iOS or Android as your tablet or smartphone operating system. Isn't it possible that my opinion might be worth thoughtful consideration instead of condemnation?

Even if I might disagree with you on the second amendment, perhaps I am entitled to my opinion without verbal abuse from someone else. It is just an opinion, I have not tried to have my thoughts turned into law.

If we end up living in a society where no one can disagree with a vocal minority or even majority, haven't we let ourselves become less civilized?

"Let’s not fight. There’s beer to
drink. There are people to woo and befriend. There are songs to be
sung and board games to play."

And then I might add...

There is bread to bake, steaks to cook, along with miles of beaches and hundreds of square miles of water to explore. Let us not forget all the birds to watch and photograph and that there are a few fish left to chase and catch. Finally, I would rather end up your friend than your enemy.

January 26, 2013

Most folks use computers for basic things that we have come to accept as part of modern life. Email, browsing and shopping on the web and even Facebook have become part of everyday life for many people.

The computer is a good way to pick up information about any of the passions in your life. If pictures are big part of your life, the computer can make it easier to share your love of photography.

Many of these things can now be handled by a smartphone and/or a tablet. Sometimes it can be easier on one of those devices or they can turn out to be a pain. While I have a better solution now, I can remember some painful moments typing passwords on smartphones.

Still there are many of us who find we are more productive on certain tasks using traditional computers. I am one of those people who can keep more than one computer busy. That is my desktop pictured at the top of the post.

Computers are even more important for those of us who make our living from them. They are the tools of our trade and good tools as any craftsman will tell you can make all the difference in the world.

I write for a living and build websites to promote my books and articles. I also have a great passion for photography and maps. The ability to accurately place my photos on a map with a computer using GIS information is important to me. It is just impossible to build a good website without a computer, and computers make it much easier to manage photos. With writing often comes the need to illustrate. I no longer even know how to do a quality job of putting together a book or article which includes photos without using a computer.

As a writer, my computer becomes a special place that I visit to think and create. I am troubled by both Windows 8 and Macintosh OS X Lion. While they are the latest and greatest operating systems from the two largest mainstream OS vendors, I think they often get in your way and make us less productive than previous operating systems.

It is annoyning enough to have my smartphone beeping at me when someone in one of my social networks does something. I don't need my computer also doing that.

I don’t want to dig into the details because operating systems are like religion and politics to many folks in technology. I have received enough complaints and been called more nasty names than I care to remember for recent articles detailing the failings of both Microsoft and Apple.

I would like to point out what I am doing to make my life on the computers that I use more productive. It is a solution that has come a long way. It is perhaps one that will bring shudders to some folks, but it something to keep in mind the next time you have to throw away a perfectly good computer just because either Apple or Microsoft has left you behind.

The solution for me is Linux. I am admittedly more technical than most computer users, and I have been using Linux as a hobby for a little over eight years. It has never been my main operating system, but that might be changing.

There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that eight years ago getting a computer to run Linux was a huge technical challenge. It took me nearly a month to get Linux and Windows running on the same machine. I even had to buy a new hard drive controller to make it work. Those days are long gone.

Today’s Linux may well be easier to install than any other operating system. My recent experience with a brand new Apple Mac Mini is a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks picking an Apple product solves all of your problems. While Windows 8 machines have been easier to bring up to speed, I am still left with the annoyances of Windows 8. It is just too complex and busy.

On top of Linux being easier to install, now you can use virtualization to avoid just about every hardware headache in the book. Virtualization which lets you runs different operating systems in software emulation is a trend that is sweeping the world of large corporations.

Fortunately we consumers can also take advantage of it. For $50 I bought VMware’s Fusion product for the Mac. I got Linux installed on my new Mac Mini before Apple even got my new computer completely updated with the latest software.

I am using Xubuntu Linux. It is has a simple interface and comes with a set of applications that I am comfortable using. I am using AbiWord for documents, gThumb for pictures, Gnumeric for spreadsheets, and Thunderbird for email. I have both Firefox and Chrome installed as browers.

My desktop looks intimidating, but it is really not that scary. The left screen is an I5 Windows 8 Lenovo computer. I use it mostly for photo storage and manipulation. I have settled on Adobe’s Lightroom as my photo editing product. I also have photos in Picasa on Windows and iPhoto on my iMac. My email is also available via Postbox on the Windows 8 machine and Mail on my Apple machine. Since I use IMAP based mail clients, I can really look at my mail from any machine including my Nexus 7 table or my LG Spectrum smartphone.

The middle screen in my desktop usually has Linux running on it with six different workspaces. It is very easy for me to move from one task to another. The screen on the right usually has straight Mac stuff running on it. I do my scanning from the Mac. My current favorite graphics tools is Pixelmator which only runs on the Mac. I use a couple of web tools that are cross platform but I also use Rapidweaver and my favorite FTP client, Fetch, is also Mac only. The laptop is my trusty Windows 7 Lenovo machine. It is one of my favorite tools.

I move files between the platforms with Dropbox if I want to move it to or from the Linux world. For the Mac and Windows sides, I often use Google drive. There are times when I cannot wait for Google Drive to update and I will switch to one of my USB thumb drives for moving files.

The virtualization client, VMware Fusion, asks me what to do when I plug in a device to one of the USB ports. I can connect to the Mac or Linux sides of the computer. So far all of the printing and other tasks that I have tried with Linux have worked without any challenges. That is a huge improvement from eight years ago, but Linux has been a reliable partner for the last three or four years. This last time I didn't even have to install a printer drive. It just saw what the Mac had installed.

I will be reporting on my progress over the next few months, but I am already more content on my desktop than I have been in months. With the battle I had with my iLemon and the challenge of getting my Mac Mini up to speed, I am ready for some peace on the desktop.

While I am functional on Windows 8, there is always something annoying me. The famous Charms and I have some challenges on my Lenovo tower that does not have a touch screen. My Lenovo Yoga with a touch screen is more usable, but I still do not find the sense of peace that I do in using Linux.

Instead of the computers trying to control me which I often feel on Mac OS X Lion or Windows 8, I am now back in control. That is the way it should be.

I also plan to install Linux directly on an old Windows laptop. It will be interesting experiment. Given it had Vista and only 2 GBs of ram, this could be a real transformation. I encourage anyone who is tired of the operating system roller coaster to give Linux a try. You can usually download a live CD and try it without making any changes to your computer. It is similar to playing around with virtual machines. For some strange reason the virtual machine software costs $100 more for Windows than it does for the Mac.

January 13, 2013

I have owned computers since 1982 when I bought my first Apple II+. Over the years, computers got old and new ones took their place. Often the monitors and the printers would last longer, but even they eventually needed to be replaced.

As computer prices have fallen and new devices have been introduced, we feel tremendous marketing pressure to upgrade to the latest and greatest products. After a life working in technology, I am likely more addicted to new stuff than most people.

For twenty years a career at Apple gave me a source of the latest and greatest techno-tools. I won one of the first iPads off the production line in a sales contest. There was always an employee promo where I could buy a slightly old product at a bargain basement price.

The problem was that I ended up with a basement full of old computers. The way the world of technology works, even the best of them eventually have to be retired because manufacturers stop supporting them in the hopes that you will buy something new.

Starting in 2004 a series of Apple products that did not exhibit Apple's legendary longevity got me thinking about technology in a different way. If technology was only going to last eighteen to twenty months like my 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4, why buy the most expensive?

My next laptop from Apple was a white MacBook. While it also had to go back to the factory for repair, at least it broke while under warranty and was less expensive. A couple of hard drive transplants helped keep the MacBook going for five years. During that five years I also learned that I could accomplish just about everything I needed to do with an even less expensive Windows laptop.

When the MacBook started dying it got replaced by a 15" Lenovo I7 laptop that cost less than half the price of an equivalent Mac laptop. At the same time my MacBook was dying, my iMac, otherwise known as my iLemon, was also in its death throes.

I managed to keep the iLemon limping along for several months by running it off an external drive. While I was battling to keep the iMac going, I came close to leaving the Mac platform. I finally decided that there were a few reasons to continue using a Mac so I recently took delivery of the cheapest Mac that I could find.

My new Mac is Apple's bottom end MacMini. True to Apple's form, it might be the low end model, but it is still not inexpensive. The MacMini listed for $599 and did not even come with a keyboard, mouse or a DVD drive. The Lenovo tower that I bought the same week cost only $499 and came with a hard drive twice the size, twice the memory, a DVD drive, and they threw in a nice keyboard and mouse. The Lenovo tower is replacing my dual G5 Mac which just celebrated its eighth birthday last December. I still use it, but there is no longer a current browser available for it so its uses are minimal and mostly limited to Photoshop which I don't want to buy again.

The MacMini got attached to the eight year old flat panel screen that originally came with the dual G5. The Lenovo tower got hooked up to a three year old Dell LCD screen. It is hard to believe that I am managing to use these computers without a single Apple Retina display. The two new computers join a Dell Pentium III system that was purchased in September of 2004. It is running Ubuntu Linux and fortunately the Linux folks value older hardware so I have a good set of current browsers on it.

Together my two new computers cost a couple of hundred dollars less than the price of a single new iMac. My iLemon is the last all in one computer that we will purchase. Adding video connectors so dead iMacs can be used as monitors later won't change my mind. I am done with products like the iMac.

iMacs are hard to service and are typically hard to upgrade. The iLemon was our family's eighth iMac. I think only one is still running. The others all had to be replaced and all those still working and beautiful CRTs and flat panel screens went to recycling. It is something that I regret.

This whole disposable technology thing puts us all in some interesting situations. Just a year ago I ended up buying a new laser printer because it was cheaper to buy a new printer than to gamble that a new cartridge would solve the problems on my old printer.

I have no plans to abandon technology which plays a big part in my life. I'm just planning to be a lot smarter about it. I'm happy to say that both the new MacMini and the Lenovo are working well with our HP Inkjet which is over six years old. They also like my $99 laser printer.

The manufacturers of televisions are pushing hard to sell these new smart TVs. I'm hoping to add a few features to our six year old television for around $100. If Apple ever comes out with their new super smart television, you can bet it will be super expensive. I won't be waiting in line for it either. I don't watch enough TV to care what kind of screen technology that we have. To me a smart TV is one that is turned off when I want some peace and quiet.

My new goal is to get the most technology bang for my limited dollars. Most technology devices don't get used to their full potential anyway. There is generally a lot that can be done even with some of the less expensive products on the market.

I suspect there is very little that anyone can do on their iPad that I can't do on my $199 Nexus 7. On top of spending fewer dollars, if I can send less technology stuff to recycling, I will sleep better at night.